Decision Support For Long-term Water Resource
Management In Semi-arid Areas:
Insights From South Africa
Author(s)
W. J. de Lange & T. E. Kleynhans
Abstract
Public goods, such as bulk water supply infrastructure, have proved vulnerable to
failures in market and government allocation strategies. Common to both
strategies are uncaptured costs and benefits. This implies a measurement
problem due to shortcomings in quantification techniques for estimating costs
and benefits for different market- and government-driven allocation strategies
and led to decisions based on incomplete information. With legitimate decisionmaking
depending on reliable information, the measurement problem poses an
obstacle to social welfare maximisation. This paper incorporates components of
economic valuation theory, multi-criteria decision analysis, a public survey and a
modified Delphi expert panel technique to score the multi-criteria attributes and
assign weights. The approach was applied in the Western Cape province of
South Africa and specifically focused on a choice problem regarding different
long-term bulk-water resource management options for the area. The decisionmaking
context was broadened to accommodate unaccounted-for costs and
benefits in water resource allocation decision-making. Both spatial and temporal
dimensions of the decision-making context were expanded. The spatial
expansion manifested in the physical expansion of the management area, which
led to expansions in representation in the decision-making process. The temporal
expansion manifested in the consideration of different sequences of bulk supply
schemes over time instead of a selection of schemes at the same time. Two
surveys were conducted to accommodate such expansions. The first focussed on
public preferences towards long-term water allocation management and the
second on inputs of members of an expert panel by means of a modified Delphi
technique. Questions regarding whether, and if so, to what extent, the public
needed to be accommodated in long-term water resource allocation decisionmaking
came to the fore. A broad acceptability towards a willingness to pay for
\“greener” water was observed and the outcome may be used to motivate a
paradigm shift among managers to consider, without fearing harm to their
political positions, \“greener” water supply options more seriously, even if such
options imply higher direct costs.
Keywords: water management, decision-support, public participation.
Keywords
water management, decision-support, public participation.
Related Book
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